Oh, no.

It's that time of year again, where each day, I find myself happily wishing my life away. Counting the days until it's the "Shortest Day" and then one week later, New Year. Oh, joy of joys, the start of a new year, daylight increasing by the minute and soon the hour.
Gawd, how awful this time of the year is. The darkness, dampness, depressing, cold and solitary confinement of being indoors so much. The walking round the marsh through the mud and the water, weighed down in heavy clothes that protect against the cold but must add extra mileage to your endurance levels.
So much better are the warm and sunny days of lightweight clothing, the carefree days of birds, butterflies, bees, and all things that don't really matter, because you have a whole, long, summer's day to do it in.
Yes, I'm counting the days, cocooned in my world of darkness and depression, the long nights and the short days - saved only by the promise that another Spring will eventually arise.

A Lament

Famously, Dylan Thomas once wrote of his dying father
"Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

These days, as old age begins to wrap itself around me, I find it harder each day to rage against the claws of cold that come with every winter's month. Every time I pass a mirror the face looking out at me is an old man's version of my younger self. It's not pleasant and winters make the face look older.
Anyway, the nature reserve is suffering winter now as well, it's wet and it's muddy. Tracks that in the summer blew dust across the butterfly wings, now have no fun to sing of. Only Skylarks still sing from leaden skies, small cheer and I thank them for that.

Once, several years ago, as I wandered alongside a huge phragmites reed bed on a cold and windy winter's day, I startled up a Marsh Harrier from it's depth. I stood there for a moment and wondered what it would be like to shelter in that reed bed and resolved to find out for myself. With a glance in either direction to make sure that nobody would be witness to my strange way, I fought my way in. Arriving in the center of this great jungle of reeds I was tightly surrounded in every way and even the brown seed plumes were a couple of feet above my head. It was a totally different world and as I crouched down in there, there was no wind and no cold, I felt totally secure from what the weather and any other living thing could do to me.

This autumn/early winter is turning out to be wetter than the several that have gone before it and yet surprisingly, we still lament at the failure of the ditches and dykes to increase in depth. The grazing meadows are soft and the return of cattle this week are seeing tracks churned into clawing mud but still water levels remain low. The neighbouring arable fields are still soaking up the rain and failing to release it into the reserve's water systems and consequently those birds that like the water still remain scarce.

Thinking Back

This afternoon, a typical cloudy and cold November afternoon, I sat in the conservatory and aided by an Alison Krauss CD and a couple of glasses of a particularly good Pinot Noir, I sat staring across the Thames estuary to the Essex shore. As you do at such times, I found myself reflecting on the past summer and a particularly good weekend in July.
Sunday 14th July was a very warm and sunny day and I was at my partner's in Surrey. We had planned to go out but the afternoon coincided with the Cricket World Cup Final and the Wimbledon Men's Final. I spent the afternoon enthralled by the cricket, listening to it through headphones attached to my Laptop, while we both watched the tennis at the same time on the TV. Both finals ended in the way we wanted them too and after some dinner it still remained a very warm and humid evening, so how not to waste it.
At 9pm with the light barely beginning to fade, we set off for some woods nearby where Nightjar annually breed. I had never seen Nightjars,coming from a marshland habitat and so the prospect was quite exciting. We made our way through a large wood and came out above a large, shallow valley full of trees, scrub and bracken where the Nightjars were regularly seen, close to and after dark, they being a nocturnal bird. We sat on a bench, surrounded by trees and looked down over the habitat below us as dusk began to quickly settle in. As it became gloomier and more humid, the only thing we saw for some time were bats, no doubt feeding on the millions of mosquitoes that were swarming round us. Then, just as it was getting almost to gloomy to see anything, a loud churring begun below us, the sound of a male Nightjar calling, quickly echoed by another some way away - so exciting! Then a dark shape against the fast receding sky flew past us, my first ever Nightjar - wow! After that, it was too dark to see anymore, but we listened to them for a while before it was time to make our way back through a very dark wood.
But there, the excitement didn't end, small glows of luminous light began to show in the undergrowth, my first Glow worms for fifty odd years, it was almost magical.
We emerged from the wood as the first stars were beginning to light the sky and made our way home, where we ended a humid evening by sitting in a dark garden, drinking white wind and feeding even more mosquitoes for a while - easily the best day of this year.